


you were more of a cure than you knew

by nonbinarynino



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir Has a Crush on Ladybug, Chat Noir/Ladybug-centric, Episode: s03e01 Chameleon, F/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 10:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16784992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonbinarynino/pseuds/nonbinarynino
Summary: Ladybug snorts, and he watches with muted dismay as she wipes the back of her gloved hand against her eyes. “Oh, yeah, totally,” she responds, voice thick with both sarcasm and misery. He hates it,hatesit. “I love to sit on rooftops at eight at night. How’d you even find me, Chat?”





	you were more of a cure than you knew

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of the Chameleon trailer! Hope you enjoy! I haven't written ML in like 2 years so hopefully I'm not too rusty
> 
> tumblr: nonbinarynino

The red of her suit contrasts so starkly against the gray of Paris - the sky, the buildings, the cement - that Chat nearly falls straight out of the sky when he sees her. She’s facing away from him, pressed up against a wall, and the way that she is curled up on herself makes him both curse and thank his night vision. He curses it because he _aches_ to see her like this, so small and clearly upset, and he thanks it because now he can attempt to make those feelings go away.

She jolts when he lands a yard away from her, his feet hitting hard against the concrete. “Evening, my lady,” he says, bowing with a flourish despite the low probability of her being able to see him. “Come here often?”

Ladybug snorts, and he watches with muted dismay as she wipes the back of her gloved hand against her eyes. “Oh, yeah, totally,” she responds, voice thick with both sarcasm and misery. He hates it, _hates it._ “I love to sit on rooftops at eight at night. How’d you even find me _,_ Chat?”

He shrugs as he lowers himself to sit next to her, hoping that she’ll notice his unspoken offer to put her head on his shoulder. She doesn’t do anything about it, just stares intently at her hands as if she’ll break if she looks anywhere else. “You know me, Bugaboo. This cat just can’t be contained.” An overwhelming part of his brain demands over and over to know what happened, to know who made her feel like this, but he grits his teeth to keep himself from speaking those thoughts out loud. Not when she so clearly needs him to be kind, not vengeful.

“Me neither,” Ladybug replies, and he’s so caught up in his thoughts that he almost forgets what she’s saying that in response to. “I know we usually don’t patrol on Mondays, but - I just had to run around a little.”

“Why’d you stop?” he asks.

She smiles at that, still unable to meet his eyes, and finally makes the move to lean on his shoulder. His arm opens around her instinctively, curled so that his hand can rub circles into her left shoulder. “I don’t know. Guess it’s kinda hard to do parkour and cry at the same time.”

“That’s a fair deduction,” he agrees, leaning back so that his head touches the smooth cement of the wall behind them. “Cats have great ears, you know, in case you’d want to utilize them.” She’s certainly been there for him, when necessary - vague complaints about his father, breakdowns about how he was being worn down so thin that he could hardly breathe. He’d never deny an opportunity to return the favor, if she trusts him to.

She opens her mouth and then closes it, as if not knowing what she wants to say. “My friends,” she says after a long pause, delicately, as if one wrong word will reveal her identity, “they… they were pretty awful to me today. Not to say that I didn’t do _anything_ wrong, but I don’t think that they should have gone to the lengths that they did.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, just as careful, because just as much as she doesn’t want to reveal herself, _he_ doesn’t want her to feel like he’s trying to get clues out of her. “It doesn’t sound like they’re very good friends, then.”

“The issue is that they _are,_ most of the time,” Ladybug replies, and, God, how is it possible for her to sound fond and horrified at the same time? How can she be _that_ good of a person? “They check up on me, and understand when I’m always late, and are patient when I stutter or accidentally break something important. So I don’t know why they all had to turn against me so _fast._ An _akuma_ went after me!”

Chat jerks his head back, his hand unintentionally tightening around her shoulder. “ _What_?” he says, voice barely audible even to his own ears. “Oh, Ladybug, what did they _do_?”

She’s quiet for a long moment after that, the silence only interrupted by the occasional sniff, and he almost thinks that he’s ruined the entire moment. However, after a few seconds, she says, “This _girl,_ she lies to everyone that she meets. But they’re nice lies, like _bullshit_ celebrity connections or gifts she can get, so people believe them. I called her out on it, and everyone accused me of just being jealous of her. They accused me of _lying._ ”

Chat Noir winces at the way that her voice breaks, feeling her teary face press against his shoulder. The list of things that he knows about Ladybug is always getting longer, despite the obvious hurdles. He knows that she’s biracial, (“Only _one_ of my parents is Chinese, and yet every stranger treats me like I can’t speak French!”) that she’s a cat person, (“and not just because of _you,_ you silly cat!”) and, most surprisingly, that she’s an adrenaline junkie. (“I beat my PR today, so I’m feeling pretty good!”)

But most of all, he knows this: she hates liars with an intensity that cannot be matched. The moments that she’s come closest to slipping up, closest to losing her temper with innocents, have all been due to liars. He’s never asked why, always having figured that there’s a rather lengthy story behind it, but it’s apparent with every word she speaks on the subject. So the fact that her closest friends had sided with one _and_ accused her of being one? That must have _burned._

“I’m so sorry,” Chat says, for once not feeling so verbose at the sight of her tears. Half of him wants to talk and make her laugh until all of the sadness goes away, but the other half knows that it doesn’t work like that, so he bites his tongue. “They should have trusted you.”

“Thank you, kitty,” she replies, and he feels her hand reach up to stroke his hair. “I just don’t know what to do now. I can’t just pretend that they didn’t hurt me, but I don’t know how to get over it, either.”

“Maybe you don’t have to do either of those,” he says. “You can make new friends, right? Or… do you have any other friends who weren’t jerks?”

She tilts her head, considering. “I have you, of course,” she says. _Okay, it is not the time to get giddy, Adrien,_ he scolds himself, despite the blush on his cheeks. “There’s two other people, I suppose. They’re reliable. Three friends is better than none, right?”

“Of course,” Chat replies. He only really has three friends, anyway. Sure, he gets along with everybody, but the number of people that he hangs out with outside of school is slim. There’s Nino, who has easily taken the title of best friend, Chloé, who he’s known forever, and Marinette, his first friend from Dupont. Alya technically counts, but it’s not like the two of them would ever hang out together without bringing Nino or Marinette.

Speaking of: Marinette. Chat feels _bad_ for her, horribly so. The way that things had gone down today at school still leaves a bad taste in his mouth. It had just been so weird to see her so… _angry._ On the offense. The only negative emotion that he’s ever really seen Marinette have is embarrassment. Seeing her poke holes in Lila’s story, instead of trying to understand her like usual had been odd. Like there was this whole other part to Marinette that he had never seen.

But the way that the entire class had gone against her? She is the class _representative,_ of course she wouldn’t have wanted to sit in the back. Especially without any of her input. But it’s not like Chat could have _done_ anything about it, right? After all, at the moment, he’d just been Adrien Agreste, the timid teenage boy who isn’t supposed to be rude to _anybody._ If Father had found out that he’d been mean to Lila, he’d be grounded forever.

… Regardless of whether or not there’s anything that he could have done, he’ll apologize to her as soon as he can, anyway. She’s probably not feeling too great right now, either.

“Kitty?” Ladybug says, voice sounding amused. “Are you in there?” She presses her finger that’s already running through his scalp hard against his head, as if testing to see if there’s a brain inside.

“Chat.exe has stopped working,” he replies, voice robotic in an attempt to make her smile. She does, something bright and blinding, and he immediately feels as though he’s done something right. “System is rebooting.”

“My partner has really been a synth this whole time,” she says, sighing dramatically. Chat _loves_ it when she goes along with his jokes. “This is tragic. I guess I’ll have to steal his miraculous.”

Chat mock gasps at the concept, reaching down to tickle her. Ladybug _shrieks,_ in a tone that’s oh-so familiar even though he’s never heard her use it before. “You - you _jerk_!” she screeches, batting him away. “I will fight you! Hawkmoth has got _nothing_ on a scorned bug, you know!”

He laughs and ducks away from her flailing arms. “I never knew you were so _ticklish,_ ” he remarks, beaming at her scowl. She shrieks another laugh when he tries again, using her hands to push herself away from him. “Why are you laughing? This is serious, not a _laughing matter_!”

“I was _wondering_ when your bad jokes would start,” she says, pointing at him with two fingers to show that she’s watching him. “That one was bad, anyway.”

“How dare you,” Chat says, though he doesn’t feel very offended at all. “It was the best that I could do! Nothing rhymes with laugh!”

Ladybug stands, abrupt, smiling down at him as if she simply can’t help it. “Thank you,” she says, and she’s not talking about his bad joke. “It means a lot. Really.”

He gets to his feet as well, not one to be looked down upon. “Of course,” he says, soft, and then: “Hey, want to see what restaurants will give us free food?”

“Chat!”

“I’ll take that as a yes!” He’s running off of the rooftop before the words are even out of his mouth, and even though she’d attempted to scold him, he can hear her continued giggles as she jumps after him.

He’s not sure what will happen to her in regards to her friends at school - not sure if they’ll reconcile, not sure if her friends deserve to. But he wants, more than _anything,_ to be there for every step of the way.

He can only hope that she’ll continue to let him.

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY YOU KNOW HOW SO MANY PEOPLE WANT MARINETTE TO MOVE SCHOOLS
> 
> concept: she does so, eventually falling out of love/infatuation with adrien due to him not standing up for her. can you IMAGINE how the identity reveal would go after that?


End file.
